Quakerism in Danzig

Abstract

THE BULLETIN OF Friends Historical Association Vol. 41Autumn Number, 1953No. 2 QUAKERISM IN DANZIG By William I. Hull* Edited by Henry J. Cadbury [The following pages have been copied with some abbreviation from the manuscript history of Quakerism in Holland prepared by the late William I. Hull. He subsequently revised his plan for this elaborate work so as to present part of it in ten monographs of which five were published between 1933 and 1941, the last of them, posthumously. But the manuscript included the story of Quakerism in nearly one hundred places, most of which were not systematically dealt with in the published volumes. Danzig was one of these, for the work aimed to include western Germany as well as Holland. This section seemed independent enough to publish now separately. The editor is grateful to Hannah C. Hull for permission to do so. The omissions are mainly of long quotations from sources available elsewhere in print. The additions in the present editing are indicated by square brackets as in this note. The last half is summarized here in a note. Attention may be called here to the brief chapter on the same subject in William Hubben's Die Quaker in der deutschen Vergangenheit, (Leipzig, 1929), pp. 97-101, and to the current research carried on by Marek Waysblum as noted in this Bulletin, 40 (1951), 39.] * William I. HuU (1868-1939), Howard M. Jenkins Research Professor of Quaker History at Swarthmore College, was the author of William Perni and the Dutch Quaker Migration to Pennsylvania (1935) , Benjamin Furly and Quakerism in Rotterdam (1941), and other works. 81 82Bulletin of Friends Historical Association THIS city, far distant from the Netherlands, in the northeastern part of Prussia, by which it was annexed in 1793, became familiar with Quakerism at an early time in the history of the Friends. William Ames made his appearance in it in 1661, and wrote an epistle there in the same year addressed to "My worthy Brothers, Sisters and Friends, for whom by God's will I have labored so that the immortal seed might be awakened in you."1 This letterwas printed in the Dutch and affords evidence that the people of Danzig and of the parts of Germany among whom Ames labored were of Dutch nationality or descent. Danzig was then, and until 1793, a free city under the suzerainty of the King of Poland, and Ames made a missionary excursion from it into the Kingdom of Poland, among the Mennonites, whom he calls "Baptists," and then says of them that "they are a very wicked people, notwithstanding their profession"; of the Polish people he says that they "are much like unto the Ireish people." [At this point W. I. Hull inserts the text of two letters from Ames to Fox (A. R. Barclay MSS 8 and 7) which he subsequently published in The Rise of Quakerism in Amsterdam, 1655-1665, pp. 72-76.] The visit of William Ames to Danzig must have resulted in some of its inhabitants accepting Quakerism, for we find in a letter from Steven Crisp, probably written to Isaac Penington, and dated Amsterdam, the tenth of Second Month, 1663, the following postscript: "One thing I had forgot to acquaint thee with: two days ago arrived here, two or, three Friends, who say they were banished from Dantzick."2 It is stated also, in a letter from William Caton to Margaret Fell in 1664, that the city magistrates had resorted to imprisonment and banishment to exterminate the new heresy. Some idea of the beginnings of Quakerism in Danzig and of the way in which the magistrates entered upon its extermina1 W. I. Hull, The Rise of Quakerism in Amsterdam, 16551665 (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 1938). p. 78 and note 145. 2 Letters of Isaac Penington, edited by John Kendall (London, 1796) , p. 102. Quakerism in Danzig83 tion is given by Benedict Figk,3 a minister of the Parish- Church of Danzig. In one of the appendices to his German version of Richard Blome's Fanatick History he gives an account of the "examination of some Quakers at Dantzig." [The first part of this was printed in The Rise of Quakerism in Amsterdam, pp...